Surmia, founded during the Season of the Phoenix of 1020 AE, was once one of the most prosperous cities in the Kingdom of Ascalon, along with Ascalon City, Nolani Academy, Drascir, and Rin. The city of Surmia was established as a monument honoring those who died during the second Guild War. It was built outside the Great Northern Wall as part of honoring the fallen, recognizing their brave deeds and performing a brave deed of their own, and was one of the first cities to fall to the Charr invasion and the Searing.

Greetings everyone. In the light of some of the recent pre-launch server choice notions and related with it issues among the community I think it's a good idea to start building upon Ruins of Surmia. We have an opportunity to start a wonderful community here and it's only up to you if you'd like to join us and become a part of what could end up being a great neighborhood.

Why Ruins of Surmia? Well, here's why:

1. What we'd like to do is populate a server that might otherwise end up being a ghost town. There are some servers that seem to have a big chance of becomng very populated (if not over-populated) in a short time after headstart and it'd be great of we could balance that out. Jumping on the bandwagon to join the most popular servers might be a really bad idea at the end of the day. PvE areas may become overcrowded to the point where some of the people will have problems with server lag and client-side performance issues. WvWvW queues will probably become unbearable. In the meantime servers like Ruins of Surmia might be empty-ish, making the players run away from them, which will only further develop the imbalance. We'd like to avoid that.

2. Some of the servers are being claimed as unofficial "insert non-English language here" servers. There's a huge portion of the community that wishes to find a place to stay where English is the predominant language, even if it's not their mother-tongue. Right now the official unofficial "UK servers" are the ones that we feel will become overcrowded, hence we chose Ruins of Surmia as an "international English" server. We'd like the majority of the community there to be able to communicate with ease so we agreed on English as the main language.

Now, if you want to play with an English-speaking community on a "growing" and not "overcrowded" server come join us in Ruins of Surmia. If your guild or alliance has still not decided on your server of choice or perhaps you'd like to move away from the crowds, we'll welcome you in Ruins of Surmia.

I propose a guild for all the people of Surmia, known as "The People of Surmia" or "The Republic of Surmia", "The Free People of Surmia".

Something along those lines.

Its purpose, to unite the community under a unified banner that respects equality and fair treatment. It will hold no requirements on its members, and will promote friendship, fairplay, and respect for all the community.

Ruins of Surmia is also flagged as the unofficial EU English RP overflow server (if people can't get onto Piken Square), just as an FYI. Though I doubt a few RPers are going to disrupt your plans

Suits me fine. I have no problem with RPers, indeed I find them a generally agreeable crowd. I was originally going to go to Piken Square, but it is probably a bit unfair taking spots that should go to people who actually intend to RP, so I will give RoS a spin. I have no inclination towards leading/organising a guild so I will leave it to others who have more interest in such things, but I don't mind assisting with anything if required.

it was my first server choice and it was full of spanish people spamming the world chat.. is it still like that? else i might come back to it

Surmia had been chosen by the Spanish community as their server of choice. Then an official Spanish server was created, and the majority of the guilds based in Ruins of Surmia moved to Baruch Bay instead. Now, unless people move to Surmia (which is the goal of this discussion), it's essentially completely deserted.

Suits me fine. I have no problem with RPers, indeed I find them a generally agreeable crowd. I was originally going to go to Piken Square, but it is probably a bit unfair taking spots that should go to people who actually intend to RP, so I will give RoS a spin. I have no inclination towards leading/organising a guild so I will leave it to others who have more interest in such things, but I don't mind assisting with anything if required.

If we are to set up a guild, I think it must be organised by several people. For one person to do it alone could be seen as dictatorship.

If we are to have a common guild, it should be governed by an electorate. All members should have equal rights, the purpose of the guild to act as a meeting-block for people to make new contacts, and to promote a feeling of server community. Everyone should have the freedom of representing the guild alone or together by bearing its emblem, a symbol of server pride!

As for the choices in what upgrades and whatnot to research, it should be put to a vote to the people.

In my (limited) experience, larger MMO groups actually tend to work out best when the leadership is a benign despotism, with a few immediate underling officers to handle recruitment. With smaller guilds, it doesn't matter so much either way how it's set up.

Anyway, would be cool if some existing guilds could move to Surmia, too, so it actually merits the label it has just now on GW2Guilds.

In my (limited) experience, larger MMO groups actually tend to work out best when the leadership is a benign despotism, with a few immediate underling officers to handle recruitment. With smaller guilds, it doesn't matter so much either way how it's set up.

Anyway, would be cool if some existing guilds could move to Surmia, too, so it actually merits the label it has just now on GW2Guilds.

Yeah. The word needs to spread around. I know a lot of friendly guilds that would willingly move to Surmia if they knew it would no longer be dominated by Spaniards.

NO DON't GET REDDIT HERE, reddit just ruins games and server, horrible people, they are wannabe 4chan, they and 9gag is cancer.. so please.. get reddit the ng.. away from there.

and btw.. i have a guild named Whispers of AScalon going to be in ruins of surmia, check out the topic on guild recruitment.

btw.. lets claim it as english, i coulda moved to norwegian/danish/swedish server.. but mehh.. wont bother. (btw im from norway)

Following discussion on the thread just a little bit further down on this forum regarding unofficial language servers, it's actually already been marked on GW2Guilds as the 'unofficial International English Server', which is nice.

I think I will now join to you at release and see how this goes (since there is the possibility to swap within first weeks). I have been on Desolation and I was already thinking about going to less popular server. I was considering Far Shiverpeaks as option for desolation since it is Scandinavian (I'm Finnish), but I will rather be on international server. I'm old GW1 player but I lost connection to my GW guild due wow "career", so I will come alone and start whole new life.

Great initiative Joe!
My guild will be joining Ruins of Surmia as well (Quality over Quantity), and i really hope we can establish a nice community there.
Remember that the first million is always the hardest to get, and therefore it just takes a few guilds to settle there and eventually the snowball will be rolling.
I'm really excited about this initiative, and i really hope that like-minded guilds will consider Ruins Of Surmia!